MrMcGasion @ MrMcGasion @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

Agreed. Also if you put a firewall app on your phone and watch how often various "closed" apps attempt to phone home. Twitter (or X now if I have to call it that) and Hulu make far more frequent requests, even when closed, than TikTok does. Not that every request is necessarily related to data harvesting, but a good amount of data about your location can be gathered just by tying the IP addresses your phone connects to their servers from to your account. The amount of fearmongering over TikTok in comparison to other apps seems absurd to me, and I haven't even looked at any of the apps from Facebook.

I've been in photography classes where Photoshop wasn't allowed, although it was pretty easily enforced because we were required to use school provided film cameras. Half the semester was 35mm film, and the other half was 3x5 graphic press cameras where we were allowed to do some editing - providing we could do the edits while developing our own film and prints in the lab. It was a great way to learn the fundamentals and learning to take better pictures in the first place. There were plenty of other classes where Photoshop was allowed, but sometimes restricting which tools can be used, can help push us to be better.

I daily drive Linux and dislike the way Windows works as well. That said, with the way Windows works, remember you aren't getting an accurate representation of performance unless you boot it often, because Windows update is a pretty major resource hog until there are no more pending updates. Again, fully agree Windows is a mess of an OS, and it boggles my mind why so many people are okay with it, but it's also significantly worse the longer it goes between uses.

Based on the recent development work that appears to be happening in SteamVR for Linux, which hasn't gotten that much love since a couple months after Alyx released, my money is on this being a "standalone" VR headset. That said, I'll be happy with almost anything at this point, I really enjoy pretty much all the hardware Valve has made over the years, and trying out their ideas for new ways to interact with games is always fun.

There are some differences between distros as to whether TRIM is enabled by default or not (I've read Ubuntu enables it by default, but Debian does not). That said, depending on what file-system your ssd is formatted with it may be enabled by default at that level. The most-often recommended file-systems for SSDs are Btrfs and F2FS, both of which support and enable TRIM by default (as of Linux 6.2 for Btrfs, so if you are running an older kernel version you might need to manually enable it). I think most distro installers support using Btrfs as the main file-system, but F2FS is a bit more hit and miss I think. Safest bet would be to investigate once you settle on a distro, but support should be pretty standard, even if it's not enabled by default.

Some labeling requires that they use the chemical name, even if there is a common name. Some brands that market themselves as "organic" or "natural" also put the common name in parentheses, but just because the label doesn't use the common name, doesn't always mean there isn't one.

I'm using Plex for all my self-hosted streaming (movies, TV, and music.) I've tried to move to jellyfin for the video streaming in the past, but for music, I've not found anything that works as well as Plex. There are things like Ampache and Navidrome that I have tried, but they didn't fit my needs that well.

As far as finding new music that I like enough to add to my server, I generally just use YouTube or a paid streaming service. There are technically ways to download songs and albums straight from YouTube, if you are okay with opus format, but I normally try to find FLAC or physical media I can rip to put into my Plex.

Skim coat a heart with your initials in it, so when the light hits the wall just right you can see the texture difference through the paint.

That's Mark Laidlaw.

(Technically Jonathan Coulton, but I couldn't resist with Mike Laidlaw being in the title)

I still use both, and already knew about this change. Is it useless overkill to keep both? Probably. But Privacy Badger also enables the GPC signal to let sites know you want to opt out of data sharing under the CCPA and GDPR. (You can enable GPC in about:config in Firefox, but that's a hassle to do on every device, and extensions can be synced across devices)

I'm sure there's plenty of discussion to be had around the effectiveness of the GPC, but to be it's worth it even if it's just as a stat of users that care about data privacy. There's also always a chance that something makes it to Privacy Badger's Blocklist before uBlock Origin's (although it's probably more likely to be the other way around).

I've wondered for a while now why so few devices seem to generate it on the fly. Even Google Home and Alexa devices seem to play a 1 hour long file that fades out and in. The older, standalone "sound spa" units played a loop a few seconds long, which bothered some listeners who could hear a pattern due to the loop (maybe due to compression artifacts). I imagine it's probably just computationally more expensive to generate it on the fly, rather than playing a file, but I also suspect that it's also just companies pushing out the minimum viable product, and looping an audio file is easiest - especially if the device is already designed to play music, or other audio files like "ocean waves" and "babbling brook."

I think there should be a separate license to drive SUVs and Trucks over a certain size. And that maintaining that license should be a bit of a hassle - like a required in-person written and practical test every 2 years. If people want that commanding view of the road and "safe" feeling that comes from endangering everyone else on the road, then they should have to put in some extra effort - not enough extra effort that it's unattainable for those who actually have a need for a vehicle of that size, but enough effort that it would discourage the widespread use we have currently.

Yeah, I'd recommend using rspamd for lower-end hardware over spamassassin. Might be a bit more work to set up, mostly because it's not as popular, and there are fewer tutorials, but it doesn't have the overhead from running on perl like spamassassin. That said, while there are people using rspamd on systems with 512MB of ram, they are usually smaller, personal setups that aren't dealing with hundreds of emails a day.

Not sure how it works on Windows, but based on a bit or research, looks like it might. It is possible to connect a phone to the PC using the "Bluetooth Audio Reciever" app on the Microsoft store. Then the phone audio should play on the PC and should play through the headphones connected to the PC. Again, not 100% sure this is a viable solution on Windows, but considering I lucked into this solution on Linux without any effort, there's probably a good chance you can achieve something similar on Windows. Might also depend on your computer's Bluetooth adapter, so ymmv, but may be worth a shot considering the shortcomings of some of the other solutions.

I daily drove the ZTE Open and then the ZTE Open C for over a year each. Still have them kicking around in a box somewhere. Returning to Android was weird, but unfortunately there just weren't good alternatives, since Ubuntu bailed on Ubuntu Touch about the same time Mozilla pivoted away from FirefoxOS.

I've considered going with a Pine Phone, but not sure I want to go back to not having 5G support at this point. Kinda hoping that eventually we might start seeing more open alternatives once RISC-V matures a bit, but that's probably still quite a few years away at this point.

And what else? I'm a very lonely man.

Gesture navigation (instead of having the navigation bar at the bottom edge of the screen). I'm too lazy to bother to ever learn to move away from the navigation bar myself, but maybe it's great and I'm missing out on getting that extra bit of screen.

And it seems his X logo is a blatant ripoff of X.org (and the X Window System).